families.”
The banker walked to the doorway and said something to one of his thugs waiting outside and then returned to Nicholas.
“Watch this.”
The door to the room opened, and Ivy flinched and looked up, then cried out and ran across the room. A boy stumbled into the room as if pushed.
“Ian! What—where did you—why are you here?” She pulled him into a fierce hug and burst into tears.
The boy awkwardly patted her back. “Sheesh, Mom, calm down. It’s okay. I’m here now, and I’ll take care of you.”
Nicholas eyed the boy’s bruised face and blackened eye, and a slow wave of rage churned through his gut. “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything. Some of my men may have gotten a little carried away.” The nasty little banker had the nerve to smile. “I wish I could always do business like this. Threatening their families makes them so much more agreeable.”
Almost casually, Nicholson backhanded the banker so hard that the man flew backward and struck the wall before sliding down to the floor.
“We don’t make war on children. Remember it,” he said.
“Don’t ever put your hands on me again, or I’ll be sure you never get one word of information about the investors,” Smithson shouted. The effect of his belligerence was muted somewhat by the fact he still sat on the floor and cringed when Nicholas turned around.
“If that boy is hurt again, even so much as a minor bruise or cut, I’ll
Smithson struggled to stand up. The man was a worthless pile of excrement, but he was no coward, Nicholas had to give him that.
“You promised to turn me. I want to be a vampire,” Smithson said. “Whatever it takes.”
“Indeed. Whatever it takes, I promise to drain all the blood from your body.” Nicholas let all the feeling and movement vanish slowly from his expression until he stood utterly motionless, like a particularly deadly block of ice.
Smithson shuddered again, but persevered. “And then give me some of yours. Three times. Once is only a blood bond, I know that much.”
Ivy pounded on the window, saving Nicholas from the annoyance of a reply.
“You let him go,” she screamed. “I’ll do anything you want. Just let him go.”
Nicholas pressed a button on the panel set into the wall next to the window and leaned forward. “You’ll do anything I want, anyway, my beautiful little witch. Now try again with the jewel, and we’ll send in food and drink for you and the boy.”
Tears gathered in her eyes, but she blinked them back, squaring her shoulders to appear strong for her boy. Nicholas admired that in a mother. His own son’s mother had been a sniveling coward, too terrified to even let Nicholas approach his boy. No matter that Nicholas had been forced into this life; he’d not chosen to become vampire.
Ancient history had no place here, however. He banished the unwelcome memories and focused on Ivy. Beautiful and deadly, the witch had dabbled in the black side of her magic often enough to gain the title sorceress and dark powers she had no business wielding. Time enough to put shackles on her later, though. For now he needed every bit of her strength and didn’t care overly much where she found it.
“No, Mom, your nose has been bleeding again,” Ian said, trying to stop his mother from approaching the amethyst. “You know what the doctor said. Too much magic, and you could get a brain aneurysm, remember? You can’t push like this again.”
Ivy shook her head. “Ian, you don’t understand. I have to help these . . . men . . . or they’ll hurt us.” She put a gentle hand on his face and tilted it to the light to better see the bruising, and when she turned back toward the window, her eyes were glowing with a deep purple fire.
“Know this. Whoever hurt my son will pay for it,” she said, each word a deadly chip of ice. “If you touch him again, I’ll kill you.”
Nicholas inclined his head, though she couldn’t see it, and touched the panel again. “You have my word your son will be unharmed. The one who bruised him will be punished. We will not release either of you, however, until you achieve our goal. Do you understand?”
It was her turn to nod. She drew in a deep breath and then turned to the amethyst, and three quick steps later she held it in her hands. It did something to her—something he couldn’t see but which clearly hurt her, judging by the sound she made and how her face drained of all color. She only tightened her fingers around the gem and closed her eyes, and began murmuring something under her breath, a kind of chant that even Nicholas, with his vampire hearing, couldn’t quite make out.
Seconds later, though, a pulse of magic rocked the building, and a weak, pale beam of violet light shot out of the gem, spilling between her fingers and across the room. Its end terminated on the third drawer of the second in a line of filing cabinets.
Precisely spotlighting the single location in the room where he had previously hidden a small cache of gold and jewels.
“Houston, we have liftoff,” Nicholas murmured.
Smithson hesitantly moved up next to him at the mirror as the light vanished. Ivy fell to the ground, and her son ran to gather her up. Nicholas stared at the thin stream of blood that trickled from the witch’s nose. A brain aneurysm would be most unfortunate at this point in the process.
“We need to find a way to strengthen or reinforce her magic so it doesn’t harm her to use the gem,” he told Smithson.
The banker blinked rapidly, which had the unpleasant effect of making him look even more like a rodent than he usually did. “You care about what happens to her? I thought she was just a tool.”
“I take good care of my tools, as any competent mechanic would. If she dies, she is of no use to us, and we need her for this.”
“Are you finally ready to tell me what exactly the plan is?”
Nicholas glanced at the human, considering. So long as he kept Smithson at hand, there was little to no chance of betrayal. Why not, after all? There was no danger here.
“The gem acts as a dowsing rod for other gems and for gold. Any valuable mined from the earth. It might even find oil, for all we know.”
Smithson whistled, long and loud. “That’s—that’s—”
“Exactly.”
“How did you find out about this?”
“It was one of your human archaeologists, actually, who recently discovered cave writing that translated into a heretofore unknown legend from the days of the Sinagua Indians. According to these pictographs, the Sinagua hid a great treasure when the vampires first came to the area. Their medicine men warned them that they might not survive as a people, and apparently they wanted to record this story for posterity.”
Smithson held up a hand. “Hold up. Your kind is why the Sinagua died out all those years ago? Have you told anybody? All the historians and archaeologists around here would go crazy for that information, and now that vampires are part of society, you can tell them this stuff freely, right? It’s not like you can get in trouble for what some unrelated vampires did hundreds of years ago.”
Nicholas bared just the slightest hint of fang. “Are you so sure they were unrelated?”
Smithson recoiled a little, but said nothing.
“The vampire goddess Anubisa—Chaos praise her, wherever she may be—long ago laid down a prohibition against sharing our history with mortals. But none of that is your business. All you need to know is that the legend from the pictograph told of a magical gem from the city beneath the waters, and that it could find treasure such as gems and gold and silver, because like called to like.”
“The city beneath the waters? Venice?”
Nicholas wished for a moment that he could afford simply to drain the fool now and give his dead body to the
